August 7

588 B.C. - Nebuchadnezzar Burned the Temple and All the Houses in Jerusalem.

II Kings 25:8, 9 and Jeremiah 52:12, 13

Sometime in your leisure time read the story of Nebuchadnezzar. Read how God punished him and actually made him an animal for a season because of his sins. Read how he repented of his sins. This reminds us again, "Your sins will find you out," "The wages of sin is death," and "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." (Numbers 32:23; Romans 6:23; and Ezekiel 18:4)

When I was a boy, I would help plant a garden. I would be given some seed by Mother or by my Aunt Octa to go out and plant in the garden. I would put a seed here and a seed there only to find that I was not dropping the seeds fast enough. In an effort to get all the seeds planted, I recall at least one time that I dropped the rest of the seeds in one place. I covered and hid the seeds realizing that no one could see beneath the soil and that my sin would be hidden. Weeks passed and one day I was called in and asked if I had planted the seed properly. My answer was, "Yes." I still thought that my sin was hidden. I was taken to the garden, and to my surprise the place where I had planted a handful of seeds had plants growing in bunches, and I had been found out. We may think that our acts are hidden, but they are not. Let us remember to sow righteousness so that we might reap the same.

1789 - The Creation of the War Department.

1825 - The Locomotive was Invented by Stephenson.

1947 - Wood Raft Makes 4,300-Mile Voyage.

On this day in 1947, Kon-Tiki, a balsa wood raft captained by Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl, completes a 4,300-mile, 101-day journey from Peru to Raroia in the Tuamotu Archipelago, near Tahiti. Heyerdahl wanted to prove his theory that prehistoric South Americans could have colonized the Polynesian islands by drifting on ocean currents.Heyerdahl and his five-person crew set sail from Callao, Peru, on the 40-square-foot Kon-Tiki on April 28, 1947. The Kon-Tiki, named for a mythical white chieftain, was made of indigenous materials and designed to resemble rafts of early South American Indians. While crossing the Pacific, the sailors encountered storms, sharks and whales, before finally washing ashore at Raroia. Heyerdahl, born in Larvik, Norway, on October 6, 1914, believed that Polynesia's earliest inhabitants had come from South America, a theory that conflicted with popular scholarly opinion that the original settlers arrived from Asia. Even after his successful voyage, anthropologists and historians continued to discredit Heyerdahl's belief. However, his journey captivated the public and he wrote a book about the experience that became an international bestseller and was translated into 65 languages. Heyerdahl also produced a documentary about the trip that won an Academy Award in 1951.Heyerdahl made his first expedition to Polynesia in 1937. He and his first wife lived primitively on Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas Islands for a year and studied plant and animal life. The experience led him to believe that humans had first come to the islands aboard primitive vessels drifting on ocean currents from the east.Following the Kon-Tiki expedition, Heyerdahl made archaeological trips to such places as the Galapagos Islands, Easter Island and Peru and continued to test his theories about how travel across the seas played a major role in the migration patterns of ancient cultures. In 1970, he sailed across the Atlantic from Morocco to Barbados in a reed boat named Ra II (after Ra, the Egyptian sun god) to prove that Egyptians could have connected with pre-Columbian Americans. In 1977, he sailed the Indian Ocean in a primitive reed ship built in Iraq to learn how prehistoric civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and Egypt might have connected.While Heyerdahl's work was never embraced by most scholars, he remained a popular public figure and was voted "Norwegian of the Century" in his homeland. He died at age 87 on April 18, 2002, in Italy. The raft from his famous 1947 expedition is housed at the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway. (www.history.com/this-day-in-history/wood-raft-makes-4300-mile-voyage)